That Strip Club Shoot for VICE Revisited

When VICE asked me to take shots at a strip club, it was my first ever media gig, and frankly I was bricking myself without the added pressure of being surrounded by beautiful naked women. I ran around and flashed my camera as much as my inexperienced heart would allow, trying not to be a pervert but at the same time get some grimey shots I would expect VICE to use. My time getting ugly images of people was wasted as I learned afterwards they wanted a positive neon glow on the club as the the focus was it being opened and ran by a woman rather than the usual greasy blobber. Fortunately getting nice pictures of attractive women generally isn’t very difficult and I naturally acquired both.

Recently the editor for Vice NZ called me with a request that I submit some images to the Canon Media Awards, specifically the images from this article. He told me about it on the day of the deadline and informed me that they had to be submitted by 12am that night.

Frantically I had to find the original files and re-process them so that they were full-sized and ready to be judged by what I assume to be aficionados of photography. My heart racing I scanned through all of the images I took that night and to my surprise, I found that none of the images I liked the second time round I had actually submitted to VICE originally.

What I’ve noticed having gone through these old images is how much I have learned as a photographer since. Namely my editing skills using Lightroom. At the time I threw out a ton of images having no idea how to pull the light out of them. The below images are in no way perfect, but if I was to submit the images again, I would probably choose differently this time around.